The abstraction ladder can be applied to a number of situations . The example starting with Bessie the cow centers on the material world - one could call it the "economical abstraction ladder".

The website as a whole also forms an abstraction ladder, with three rungs. The bottom rung consists of the more or less direct observation of reality. In this case this is represented by reports and news items from (mostly) the papers and other media - links to this level are denoted by brown arrows pointing downward, like this: - both color and direction signifying its purpose.

The middle rung or level is our scientific description of our society, itself consisting of several (sub)levels - links towards and between these pages are green:     and .

The upper level is that consisting of philosophical, artistic and other higher level descriptions, linked to with blue arrows, of course .

The second abstraction ladder to discussed here is the one associated with the sciences, or more specific: the sciences associated with the different kinds of human behavior. Similar to the economic abstraction ladder, we begin with the individual, so with psychology. The next step is then the behavior of groups of humans: sociology. The next step is to take behavior associated with more abstract things, the first of which is money - behavior associated with money is economy. The next step is the behavior of people towards an even more abstract thing: ideas. This we call politics which is directly related, in our modern world anyway, to the way we do this talking: via the media. So politics and media are taken together to form another rung in our ladder.

So far as more or less regular steps are concerned. Now we can add the things brought into the fray of human consideration by general semantics. First of all, we reserve a space for what is the professed goal of general semantics: to get a better human society - and to get this by the application of the human sciences. This goal of a better society has a natural place on top of the society we have, and since here we will call this improved model society the "Rhineland model", this is shown as the next step of the ladder, following politics. Which we can directly follow by general semantics itself, as the ideological superstructure of it - 'ideological' meant in the nicest possible way, of course (a remark for those who already know something about general semantics).

Another addition to the ladder stems from the recognition that all of the human sciences anyway, depend on the use of language. It is also clear that much of the conscious considerations man makes in his head, are done using verbalizations, or words. So language and knowledge about language would be the bottom rung, below psychology, as is indeed shown in the first, vertically orientated, version of the ladder below.

Now it goes without saying that general semantics is also all about language, and to denote this link in the present form of the ladder, one would have to add the arrows on the side, immediately making it clear that what we now have is an circular or cyclic process.

To some linearly oriented people this might seem as a disadvantage - in fact it is quite the opposite. Many if not most of the processes associated with stable systems like living things, from simple ones like cells to complicated ones like the human body, are cyclic processes.

The particular cyclic process associated with the anthropological abstraction ladder may be designated as that of human learning. Every time he learns something new about reality, he can improve his words and concepts, and with these improved words and concepts, he can study reality anew, leading to again more improvements of his words and concepts, etcetera. So in fact this cyclic ladder is a more general form of the cyclic process of the working of science, a process so well known to the scientist, that when asked to explain how science works using a diagram, one gets remarkably similar results, see here  .

In the section below we have put these things together, with the ladder shown on the right hand side, and summaries of what has been said above about the different rungs on the left hand side. Please note that the links in the ladder are towards the Dutch version of the site, which is much more complete, so much better able to demonstrated the principles involved..

 

General semantics is the discipline that studies the relation between reality and language, and tries to improve this relation.   Het Rhineland model tries to describe a society where neither economics nor politics have the ultimate power.   Politics is the name for the collection of people that govern society, at least: purport to do this. They do this by manipulation of the word. The media are the institutions that propagate these words. Economy descries human behavior as far as money is involved, and also tries to translate everything else into money.   Sociology descries the behavior of groups of men, each with its separate inner motives, resulting in the dampening of some of these types of behavior, and amplifying others. Psychology describes the inner stirrings of man as the causes of its behavior - a large part of these stirrings occurs using language.   Language is the preferred tool with which to communicate with fellow humans, and the use of which also characterizes mankind.

GENERAL SEMANTICS RHINELAND MODEL POLITICS & MEDIA ECONOMY SOCIOLOGY PSYCHOLOGY LANGUAGE

This abstraction ladder returns in each of the overview pages associated with the different disciplines of which is is built. Due to the format of the pages it is rotated from a vertical to a horizontal lay-out, and for the same reason "language" and "general semantics" are combined into one, taking the position of "language" - resulting in the version below:
 

SCIENTIFIC METHODOL.
		MORE SPECIFIC				MORE ABSTRACT				.
LANG. & GEN. SEMANTICS		PSYCHO-LOGY		SOCIOLOGY		ECONOMY		POLITICS & MEDIA		RHINELAND- MODEL

This means that on the hierarchy pages arrows pointing to the right also point to more abstract subjects, and correspondingly, arrows to the left to more specific (arrows pointing upwards and downwards jump between parts within  the same subject). "Scientific methodology" has been added to above version of the scheme, as the discipline that says something about all the other, more specific, ones. Since one of the declared goals of general semantics is to import the scientific methodology into the human sciences, "scientific methodology" is not explicitly shown in most versions of the scheme. By the way: the main principles of scientific methodology are of course the presumption of the existence of an objective reality and the repeated testing of ones theories against this reality. General semantics has this as its basis, and since the use of words is basic to all human sciences, one imports scientific methodology into the human sciences by adopting general semantics as their basis.

Please note that this system has been completed when much of the website was already there using other considerations, so the orientation of the upward and downward arrows may differ from the conventions above.

 
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